Scribd
Upload
584 views11 pages

Linguistics & Philology

Linguistics is the systematic study of language and its properties, focusing on language structure and use. Philology is the historical study and interpretation of written texts to understand their meaning and context. While linguistics examines language in general, philology focuses specifically on analyzing written works through techniques like identifying fragments, editing texts, writing commentaries, and considering historical and cultural contexts to comprehend texts. Both fields serve complementary but distinct purposes in analyzing human language and written works.

Uploaded by

H Janardan Prabhu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
584 views11 pages

Linguistics & Philology

Linguistics is the systematic study of language and its properties, focusing on language structure and use. Philology is the historical study and interpretation of written texts to understand their meaning and context. While linguistics examines language in general, philology focuses specifically on analyzing written works through techniques like identifying fragments, editing texts, writing commentaries, and considering historical and cultural contexts to comprehend texts. Both fields serve complementary but distinct purposes in analyzing human language and written works.

Uploaded by

H Janardan Prabhu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 11

LINGUISTICS PHILOLOGY

What are linguistics, philology and phonetics?

Linguistics is the study of language in all its aspects.

In British English, the word ‘philology’ denotes the historical study of


language.

Phonetics is the study of speech.

Philology and Phonetics is the marriage of theory with data, drawing on


historical, philological and comparative linguistic data from ancient and
modern languages, and on psycholinguistic and phonetic experimental data.
Some of the techniques that were invented by the philologists
and the terms are: (1) grammar with its two branches, (a)
morphology, that is the study of the variations of the forms of
words in their different contexts, and (b) syntax, that is the
study of the mutual relationships of words in the sentence;
(2) lexicography, that is the compilation of lists of words and
their meanings; and
(3) etymology, that is the study of the reasons why certain
words have the meanings that they have.
Philology is a natural and Linguistics is a historical science.

Linguistics is the study of languages, considered in their principles,


their relations, and as an involuntary product of the mind of man.
Philology is a kind of general learning, of language, as an instrument
or medium of learning. Comparative philology is applied to several
languages which are being explained by being mutually compared
with each other. Strictly speaking, linguistics are concerned with one
language only: it criticizes, interprets its records, improves extant
texts according to the data and materials furnished by this one
language itself.
THE science of language began, tentatively, when the minds of men first
turned to problems like these :
• How is it that people do not speak everywhere the same language ? How
were words first created ?
• What is the relation between a name and the thing it stands for ?
• Why is such and such a person, or such and such a thing, called this and
not that ? The first answers to these questions, like primitive answers to
other riddles of the universe, were largely theological : God, or one
particular god, had created language, or God led all animals to the first man
that he in order might give them names.
• Was it a punishment from God that we speak so many languages?
ETYMOLOGY
Among the etymologies found in dictionaries and linguistic journals some are solid
and firm as rocks, but others are liquid and fluctuate like the sea ; and finally not a
few are in a gaseous state and blow here and there as the wind listeth. Some of
them are no better than poisonous gases, from which may Heaven preserve us !

At any rate, facts weigh more than fancies, and whoever wants to establish the
etymology of a word must first ascertain all the historical facts available with regard
to the place and time of its rise, its earliest signification and syntactic construction,
its diffusion, the synonyms it has ousted, etc. At any rate, facts weigh more than
fancies, and whoever wants to establish the etymology of a word must first
ascertain all the historical facts available with regard to the place and time of its
rise, its earliest signification and syntactic construction, its diffusion, the synonyms
it has ousted, etc. A Samuel Johnson or ‘dictionary- Sam’ is needed.
Linguistics is the systematic, study of the properties of natural language. Philology
seeks to make sense of written texts. The focus of linguistics is the systematic,
scientific study of the properties of natural language. Philology is referring to a
configuration of skills that are geared toward a historical text curatorship that refers
exclusively to written texts. Accordingly philological practice has an affinity with
those historical periods that see themselves as following a greater cultural
moment. Philology’s two-part core task is the identification and restoration of texts
from each cultural past. It establishes a distance with respect to the intellectual
space of hermeneutics and of interpretation as the textual practice that
hermeneutics informs; and lastly, philology plays a particularly important and often
predominant role within those academic disciplines that deal with the most
chronologically and cultural remote segments of the past.
Gumbrecht (2003) identifies five basic philological practices: identifying
fragments, editing texts, writing historical commentaries, historicizing (that is,
the awareness between different historical periods and cultures), and teaching
by using the texts and cultures of the past.
Early modern textual philologists agreed broadly on the kinds of problems to
address and on methods to resolve them. They also developed characteristic
instruments for keeping track of information and for spreading knowledge
(such as commentaries and editions). In this sense textual philology formed a
discipline. However, early modern disciplines were far from exclusive. By the
1920s modern disciplines grew much more strictly subdivided because of
specialization focused on subvariants of philology and its offshoots.
.
Philology has a common mode of knowledge and common methods typified by the
following features. They are:
i) interpretative in method,
ii) comparative in interpretation,
iii) sensitive to cultural, textual or visual contexts,
iv) use historical lineages for understanding,
v) shape products of history (ideas, texts, paintings, institutions, artifacts,
languages) by their historical context.
According to Turner (2014) and Pollock (2015), whereas the philological family is
interpretive, empirical, probable, and historical, philosophy, by contrast, is logical,
deductive, precise in conclusions, and dismissive of change over time.
o Linguistics deals with how the language works, and philology tries to make
sense of what texts mean.
o Linguistics and philology should and do serve each other, but the disciplines
of linguistics and philology are quite different.
o Philology can involve all manner of study and background—whatever you
need to make sense of the words that have been put together in a particular
context.
o The object of linguistic study is language (and languages); the object of
philology is making sense of texts. (Edward Greenstein, BarIlan).
...The study of the philologist is the written word, and his particular concern the
structure and history of languages, while the study of the linguist is speech, and
his particular concern the use of sound to convey meaning. Languages were
spoken for thousands of years before anyone thought of writing them down, so to
that extent the raw material of the linguist came into existence first, but language
study did not begin until languages had been written down...the proper study of
the philologist is the written word, and his particular concern the structure and
history of languages. The proper study of the linguist is speech, and his particular
concern the use of sound to convey meaning. Languages were spoken for years
before anyone thought of writing them down, so the raw material of the linguist
came into existence first, language study began after writing began.

You might also like

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy